Education and Students with Disabilities

Accessibility in the News—8/17/18.

The end of summer means students, including those with disabilities, entering the classrooms. This week, many writers took a look at the nexus of education and disability:

Charisse Hogan, contributor to The Mighty, asks that you prepare your sons and daughters to encounter and interact with children with disabilities. And she tells how important their awareness was to her as she grew up with cerebral palsy.

A great number of students with disabilities in the U.S. are integrated into standard classrooms. But is that best? One author wonders if inclusion has gone too far, and another summarizes a newly released report on the relationship between inclusive education and social inclusion, showing how mainstreaming has significant benefits.

That answer seems to merit a resounding “no,” though for a different issue altogether: Oregon Sen. Jackie Winters and the HOA he is part of denied bus service to child with disabilities. There’s a lawsuit in response.

On the flip side, Rochester Institute of Technology student Kevin Farnand has been developing a product that will soon be used by children with attention disorders.

Of course, college-level programs in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, should be accessible to everyone. But sometimes facilities, culture, and more just aren’t. So, while students with disabilities enter STEM education tracks at about the same rate as peers without, they graduate at much lower rates.

Ensuring students have equal access to education regardless of disability is core to the mission of the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Education. One writer wonders why Betsy DeVos won’t defend it.

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National News (U.S.)

As School Begins, Please Teach Your Children About Disabilities

As summer begins to come to an end and students began to prepare for a new school year, I would like to remind others of how important it is to teach children about disabilities, about differences. I hope by sharing some of my personal story, people will realize how important this is. I was born with cerebral palsy, low tone, and ataxia due to lack of oxygen at birth. I was the first child to ever enter my elementary school with a physical disability. The school worked hard to adapt things to meet my unique needs while I was a student there…

Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness

Blue light from digital devices and the sun transforms vital molecules in the eye’s retina into cell killers, according to optical chemistry research at The University of Toledo. The process outlined in the study, which was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, leads to age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the United States. “We are being exposed to blue light continuously, and the eye’s cornea and lens cannot block or reflect it,” Dr. Ajith Karunarathne, assistant professor in the UT Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said…

New app helps blind navigate through airport

Navigating through the airport isn’t always easy. Now imagine doing it all without your vision. Blind and low-vision students from Lighthouse of Pinellas participated Wednesday in a demo of a new app. St. Pete/Clearwater Airport is one of the first 13 airports in the country offering the AIRA, or Artificial Intelligence Remote Assistance technology to help those who can’t see. “If you turn immediately to your left this is the entrance to the ticketing area,” a voice coming from an iPhone explains…

RIT’s Studio 930 connects students with community partners to create life-changing assistive products

Rochester Institute of Technology student Kevin Farnand has been part of the Studio 930 Design Consultancy since its inception three years ago. But this summer is particularly special for Farnand, who proudly announced that a product he has been developing will soon be used by children with attention disorders at CP Rochester, a local organization serving individuals with and without disabilities. On Aug. 7, Farnand joined 29 other students at the exhibition of the summer consultancy, a 10-week long multidisciplinary studio experience focused on the design and production of access and health technologies products…

End of the Rainbow? New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind

Data visualizations using rainbow color scales are ubiquitous in many fields of science, depicting everything from ocean temperatures to brain activity to Martian topography. But cartographers have been arguing for decades the “Roy G. Biv” scale makes maps and other figures difficult to interpret, sometimes to the point of being misleading. And for the those with color blindness, they are completely unintelligible. Now scientists at a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory have developed a color scale that is mathematically optimized to be accurate for both color blind people and those with normal vision…

The proper etiquette around service dogs and their handlers

I didn’t bring Spike to work the other day and no one said “hi” to me — instead, they said, “Where’s Spike?!” Now I realize Spike is much cuter than I am. I get it! And it’s great. I’ve made so many new friendships and conversations because of him. Easily a dozen times a day, I’m chatting with strangers simply because I have this cute, furry love nugget by my side 24/7. My late brother Kyle would often tell me how difficult it was to interact with people because they didn’t know how to approach him and his wheelchair…

Senators: Do more to help disabled Americans gain employment

Recently, we observed the 28th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, known as the ADA, which helped recognize and protect the rights of our 56 million fellow citizens with disabilities. Since the passage of the ADA in 1990, we’ve seen enormous advances. Street corners are more accessible for those who use wheelchairs. Television is captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Many internet videos and photographs have verbal descriptions so those who are blind can know the visual content as well as the written content…

Accessibility key to aging in place

There’s no chance of retirement for me anytime soon, but with my kids grown, and my grandkids afoot, even I can get caught daydreaming of one day sailing off into the sunset with my boat. When I speak to many homeowners who are my age and older, they’re starting to have the same thoughts. They’re ready for the next chapter of their life, but every single one of them has the same theme in common: they want to maintain their independence. While some are looking forward to the social aspect of moving to “adult living” communities, for many of them, independence starts and ends with living in their own homes…

Has Inclusion Gone Too Far?

The model of special education known as inclusion, or mainstreaming, has become more prevalent over the past 10 years, and today, more than 60 percent of all students with disabilities (SWDs) spend 80 percent or more of their school day in regular classrooms, alongside their non-disabled peers. This is not the full inclusion favored by some disability advocates, wherein all SWDs would be educated in inclusive classrooms all day; however, many supporters celebrate the increasing acceptance of differently abled students in general education as an opportunity to improve the academic and long-term trajectories of these traditionally underserved learners…

Alex Elegudin is a busy man. The first-ever accessibility chief at New York City Transit has logged long hours as he carves out his new position in the mountain of bureaucracy that is the MTA. As the authority simultaneously grapples with ridership declines on slow buses and unreliable trains, Elegudin is tasked with an important challenge: improving the inaccessible subway system as well as the paratransit service for the nearly two million residents who are seniors, small children or living with a disabilities…

Defining accessibility in STEM college programs

Luticha Doucette always knew she wanted to be a scientist, even if no one else thought she could do it. “I was very much discouraged from going into the sciences. People would be like, ‘Well, don’t you want to be a teacher?’ And I would be like, yeah, teachers are great, but that’s not what my heart was in.” Doucette ended up at Rochester Institute of Technology where she majored in bioinformatics — but it wasn’t easy. For instance, in organic chemistry, she had a problem using the fume hoods…

How credit unions are tackling ADA uncertainty

The threat of litigation alleging credit union websites are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act remains a hot topic within the industry. During the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions’ annual conference this summer in Seattle, Credit Union Journal asked several attendees if their CUs had been targeted and what they were doing about the issue. Responses varied from a lament about “using the legal system for extortion” to complete website overhauls, along with a plea to the federal government to act and praising the good fortune of staying under the radar…

Latest ADA Decisions Highlight FOM’s Controversial Role

An Illinois District Court judge has added to the growing number of dismissed lawsuits alleging various credit unions’ websites violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a Georgia District Court judge has thrown out some — but not all — of another lawsuit making similar claims. According to court documents in the two most recent cases, a U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois threw out a lawsuit against Aurora, Ill.-based Aurora Policemen Credit Union on August 7, finding that because the plaintiff was ineligible to join the credit union, he had no standing or injury in the dispute…

Justice Department reaches Agreement with the City of Minneapolis to Resolve Disability and Genetic Information Discrimination

The Justice Department today announced that it reached an agreement with the City of Minneapolis to resolve its lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of disability and genetic information. The Justice Department’s complaint alleges that a veteran was not hired by the Minneapolis Police Department in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because of his disability of post-traumatic stress disorder. The complaint also alleges that Minneapolis engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination in violation of Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) by routinely requesting and obtaining genetic information from applicants for police officer positions during the pre-employment examination process. This is the department’s first lawsuit challenging discrimination under Title II of GINA. Under the agreement, Minneapolis will pay $189,338.89 in damages to the complainant, and will implement policies, practices, and procedures to ensure that it does not discriminate in its hiring practices on the basis of disability, and does not request, require, or unlawfully obtain information in violation of the ADA or GINA. Minneapolis will also train applicable Police Department employees…

Advocates Push For Greater Airline Accessibility

A lawsuit is seeking to force the nation’s airlines to make big changes in order to better accommodate travelers with disabilities. The suit filed this month against the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) accuses the agency of unlawfully delaying rules aimed at adding accessible restrooms to single-aisle airliners. In 2016, Congress directed the DOT to release rules on airplane restroom accessibility, among other issues, by July 15, 2017. However, to date, the agency has not released a rule on lavatory wheelchair access on single-aisle aircraft and the issue was recently moved to the DOT’s long-term agenda…

The family of a child with disabilities is suing Oregon Senate Republican Leader Jackie Winters and the Salem homeowners board on which she serves after it voted to bar the girl’s school from providing her with door-to-door bus service. A lawsuit filed in May by Erika Hernandez and Paolo Regalado says the restriction violates federal and state fair housing laws. The parents are asking the court to direct the Golf Course Estates Homeowners Association to allow the school bus back into the subdivision and award unspecified damages and legal fees…

Hollyhock House to Offer Virtual Reality Tour Option

Those wishing to get a glimpse inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Hollyhock House, located inside Barnsdall Art Park at 4800 Hollywood Blvd., may soon be able to do so from the comfort of their own homes, thanks to virtual reality tours planned to begin this fall. The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in collaboration with the Department on Disability (DOD) and the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation announced the planned virtual accessibility experience in a press release August 13th…

The wheelchair, a brilliant design from the 16th century, is in woeful need of an update

In 1595, Spain’s aging King Phillip II rolled around in an early prototype of the wheelchair. The 68-year-old monarch suffered from gout, and someone in his court attached wheels to a reclining chair so servants could push him around the palace. Over the last 420 years, the wheelchair has undergone enormous innovation but its basic premise has remained constant. It’s still a chair on wheels. Toyota says it’s time to rethink this paradigm, and the car company’s foundation is investing $4 million to kickstart the movement…

Advocates demand ADA-compliance at more Bronx subway stations

A group of city officials is gathering signatures and calling for subway accessibility improvements on the Mosholu Parkway. The surrounding neighborhood houses two major hospitals, three nursing homes, two senior centers and a number of residential towers. Officials are lobbying the MTA to install an elevator at the Mosholu Parkway No. 4 train station. They plan to deliver a petition at the MTA’s next public board meeting in September. According to advocates, the Bronx has the fewest Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant stations in the four boroughs connected to the New York City subway system…

Digital Inclusion Program Helps Older And Low-Income Austinites Catch Up With Technology

Jan Morgan used to think smartphones were for young people. “I didn’t want a phone smarter than me,” she joked. She refused to get one. Instead the 66-year-old bought flip phones and pre-paid phone cards. Thirty-three phones later, a store clerk pointed out that she didn’t have to buy a new phone to get more minutes. That was around the time she signed up for a computer class at her Lakeside apartment building. The classes are offered by the Austin Housing Authority as part of the city’s Digital Inclusion program…

Why Won’t Betsy DeVos Defend Civil Rights?

Betsy DeVos and the U.S. Education Department have diluted the Office for Civil Rights’ mission to defend students and employees from discriminatory practices in colleges, universities and a host of other places that receive federal funding, in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. DeVos unilaterally, and without a public comment period, decided to change policies to allow the OCR to ignore a large swath of civil rights complaints…

Poetry Is a Way of Being in the World That Wasn’t Made for Us — New work from 10 poets with disabilities

Not long after the debut of Disability, the Times’s Opinion series, in August 2016, careful readers began noticing what seemed to be an unusual trend: Among the many writers the series had attracted were several working poets. This was not a surprise to me — I am one of those poets, and a big part of my life involves work with other poets with disabilities. Sometime last year, the editor of this series, Peter Catapano, and I resolved to put together a selection of poems — a sort of digital chapbook or zine — that could be published here as part of the series…

A Mid-Year Review of the Current State of ADA Website Accessibility Lawsuits

In 2017, 814 federal lawsuits alleging website inaccessibility were filed pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). We are only mid-way through 2018 and nearly 685 federal ADA website accessibility lawsuits have already been filed. Most of these cases are being brought in the Second and Eleventh Circuits—approximately 68% of all cases filed in 2018 are venued in the Second Circuit and 27% are venued in the Eleventh Circuit. The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has provided little guidance in this area of law, having placed ADA website compliance guidelines on its “inactive list.”…

Jack Fact — According to BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, U.S. consumers will spend $632 billion online by 2020, up from $385 billion in 2016.

International News

Blind Family Hopes to See Again with Help from These Doctors

José Rosas is a Peruvian farmer who stopped working due to increased blindness caused by cataracts. Many members in his family also have vision issues. Together, they traveled to a medical clinic in Tarapoto to visit SEE International’s volunteer ophthalmologists. After evaluating José, his son, daughter, and sister, doctors decided they could operate on everyone except José’s son who had a detached retina that was unable to be repaired. Watch the events unfold in this moving piece from Blue Chalk…

It’s time to start talking about territorial accessibility legislation

At the beginning of the year Yukon Hospital Corporation unveiled a $72-million makeover at the Whitehorse General Hospital. For that money the territory got itself a snazzy new emergency room complete with a bunch of changes designed to streamline the process of seeing a doctor. But officials forgot something. The new ER came with a new entrance. That entrance doesn’t have a cutout in the sidewalk directly outside the front door which is what’s needed for wheelchair users to easily get inside…

A Creemore man has taken his request for Clearview Township to provide copies of municipal documents in an accessible format to the province. It’s the latest chapter in a saga between Peter Lomath and the municipality that includes a decision by council to apply the township’s unreasonable customer service policy. Since April 2017, Lomath has been limited in his inquiries of staff, included being permitted to only ask one question a month of the chief administrative officer — and the question can be no more than 20 words…

Do Smart Cities Have An Accessibility Problem?

As a student, the daily walk up London’s Exhibition Road, past its profusion of popular museums, was hindered by groups of tourists that stood four-abreast on the pavement, eager to learn more about the cretaceous period, or space flight, or ornamental Renaissance metalwork. I was therefore pleased when, one spring, the street was quickly transformed from a bustling thoroughfare for taxis and sports cars into a partially-pedestrianised esplanade, much of the space given over to foot traffic. What I was not expecting, two weeks after its opening, was to find a protest against the new design…

Recognising the champions of disability rights

For four Mumbaikars, years of hard work to ensure accessibility for persons with disabilities have finally paid off. They have figured in a list of 14 winners for this year’s Mphasis Universal Design Awards, instituted by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, an NGO. As they gear up to receive the awards on August 14 in New Delhi, The Hindu speaks to the four on what drove them to champion the cause:…

‘Art and accessibility go hand in hand’ at Halifax festival

More than 30 disabled artists showcased and sold their creations Sunday at an accessible, inclusive event in Halifax that included American Sign Language interpreters and sighted guides. Sara Graham was one of the co-ordinators for the seventh annual Art of Disability Festival. Being partly deaf herself, she recognizes the importance of bringing people with disabilities together to share their art. “It’s about taking risks and chances, and giving opportunity to people who want it,” she said…

The issue of accessibility in Canada is larger than one cat café in Toronto, paralympian Jeff Adams says. Meow Cat Café was in the news all weekend when Global News reported that a 16-year-old wasn’t allowed inside for a birthday outing because he uses a wheelchair. Adams went to the café Friday after seeing the report. He hoped there was more to the story, Adams told HuffPost Canada in an interview, but quickly realized there was not. “As soon as we went through the door, she was yelling ‘No wheelchairs, no wheelchairs,'” he said. “It seemed incredible, in the true sense of the word.”…

Retailers urged to sign up to Purple Tuesday – the UK’s first accessible shopping day

The UK’s first day dedicated to accessible shopping will take place during the run up to Christmas 2018. ‘Purple Tuesday’ on Tuesday 13 November will see retailers across the country – and online – introduce new measures to make the shopping experience more inclusive for disabled customers. The initiative is being co-ordinated by the disability organisation Purple and has been endorsed by the government. Leading brands including Argos, Asda, Sainsbury’s, and Marks & Spencer have already pledged their support…

A plan to make wristbands available for kids with disabilities at Storybook Gardens is getting some traction at city hall in London, Ont. The goal is to make the park more accessible by communicating to staff members whether a child might need more patience or help on rides or during activities. “We know that many disabilities are invisible so if a parent chooses to indicate that their child may need extra support, they could get that wristband,” said Ward 10 councillor Virginia Ridley…

Manufacturer partners with charity to make toilet and changing facilities accessible at popular Welsh attraction

Invacare is working with Awen Cultural Trust, a charity which operates cultural attractions and community centres around the County Borough of Bridgend, to make its toliet and changing facilities fully accessible. Invacare has recently donated a Robin overhead hoist and E C Track ceiling system, as well as a wall-mounted changing bed, which have been installed in the newly built disabled washroom at Bryngarw Country Park. This equipment will allow disabled visitors and those with restricted mobility to use the facilities (either independently or assisted by a carer) safely…

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